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Local governments can provide services with their own employees or by contracting with private or public sector providers. We develop a model of this "make-or-buy" choice that highlights the trade-off between productive efficiency and the costs of contract administration. We construct a dataset...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005830392
Corruption is believed to be a major factor impeding economic development, but the importance of legal enforcement … versus cultural norms in controlling corruption is poorly understood. To disentangle these two factors, we exploit a natural … generates a revealed preference measure of government officials' corruption based on real-world behavior taking place in the …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005720647
. Disclosure is more extensive in richer and more democratic countries. Disclosure is correlated with lower perceived corruption …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005828971
The minimum legal drinking age (MLDA) is widely believed to save lives by reducing traffic fatalities among underage drivers. Further, the Federal Uniform Drinking Age Act, which pressured all states to adopt an MLDA of 21, is regarded as having contributed enormously to this life saving effect....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005829765
The role of good management practices in organizations has recently been emphasized. Do the same principles also apply in government organizations, even the most bureaucratic and hierarchical of them? And can skilled, motivated managers identify how to improve these practices, or is there a role...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10011188541
Understanding and minimizing the transaction costs of policy implementation are critical for reducing tropical forest losses. As the international community prepares to launch REDD+, a global initiative to reduce greenhouse gas emissions from tropical deforestation, policymakers need to pay...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008836719
This paper presents a model of prosecutors' decision-making processes in which prosecutors (both federal and state) internalize some of the benefits of reducing crime, but also care about developing their own human capital. Since U.S. attorneys make their decision first, they have the...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10005575731
The paper studies the effect of additional government revenues on political corruption and on the quality of … implications of the theory and identify the causal effect of larger federal transfers on political corruption and the observed … transfers increase political corruption and reduce the quality of candidates for mayor. …
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10008622357
Tropical deforestation accounts for almost one-fifth of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide and threatens the world's most diverse ecosystems. The prevalence of illegal forest extraction in the tropics suggests that understanding the incentives of local bureaucrats and politicians who enforce...
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009294894
We study the determinants of the dynamics of firm lobbying behavior using a panel data set covering 1998-2006. Our data exhibit three striking facts: (i) few firms lobby, (ii) lobbying status is strongly associated with firm size, and (iii) lobbying status is highly persistent over time....
Persistent link: https://www.econbiz.de/10009359896